But I'm Different Now

65 thoughts, one for every year, on Paul Weller

I have borrowed a form from my friend Ian Leslie at the Ruffian whose fantastic paean to Paul McCartney you should read before you read this. 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney - by Ian Leslie (substack.com). Weller is not McCartney but he is mine and so, as he hits the grand old age of 65, I found that number of reasons why.

1.     For All Mod Cons. Listening to it in my bedroom, on a record player of very poor quality, playing it until I scratched the vinyl and it jumped on Mr Clean. There has been music I have loved more since but there has never been anything like that initial excitement. That can only happen once.

2.     The apparent rebel whose gigs were introduced by his manager and his best friend who also happened to be his dad. You can be very cool and still be nice about your old man.

3.     “Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young”.

4.     For being a wonderful guide to new music. An important service that artists can do is to open us up to their sources. I investigated Tamla Motown, Stax and Philadelphia soul, Curtis Mayfield, The Kinks, The Small Faces and The Who because of Weller’s endorsement and every minute of the investigation has been well spent.

5.     That review of Strange Town in the NME: “anyone who doesn’t own at least three copies of this record does not have the right to walk round on two legs”. I do. Somewhere in all my unsorted stuff along with all my picture covers that I once used to wallpaper a bedroom.

6.     Jam shoes.

7.     My Ever Changing Moods, in (appropriately enough) many different versions, the latest (and maybe the best) of which is accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

8.     “I know I come from Woking and you will say I’m a fraud but my heart is in the city where it belongs”.

9.     For giving me the name of my first band, Little Boy Soldiers.

10.  His baffled reaction to David Cameron when the then leader of the opposition chose Eton Rifles as one of his Desert Island Discs.

11.  That’s Entertainment. Written in fifteen minutes when he arrived home drunk from the pub. Fragments of English life and probably Weller’s best song.

12.  For making it cool for young men to read poetry.

13.  His artistic generosity. I regarded Spandau Ballet as usurpers of a crown rightly held by The Jam but Weller pointed out that they were good and I promptly changed my view.

14.  The lost tradition of the non-album single, especially All Around The World, Strange Town, When You’re Young, Going Underground and Funeral Pyre.

15.  Buying Sound Affects, on the day of release, from Vibes in Bury. The beauty of the inner sheet and the liner notes. I can smell it now.

16.  For years I have tried to figure out whether the narrative arc of Down In The Tune Station At Midnight makes any sense. He gets onto the tube with a take-away curry and a bottle of wine, at midnight. It’s a pretty late meal he is having there. And then, when he complains about getting attacked he laments that the “wine will be flat and the curry’s gone cold”. I am not sure that the 20 year old Weller knew much about wine at the time. Maybe he had opened the bottle on the tube but even then “flat” isn’t quite the word. And the curry would surely have gone cold on the journey anyway, unless he was only going a coupe of stops. Still, it doesn’t matter; it’s a fabulous song.

17.  The bass line to Town Called Malice. Of course this is Bruce Foxton but Bruce Foxton is a reason to love Paul Weller.

18.  The drums in Funeral Pyre. The same applies for Rick Buckler.

19.  Now we have mentioned Town Called Malice, there are 65 reasons to love Paul Weller in this song alone. It’s a lyrical paean to ordinary lives - “A hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts” – set to a tune out of Holland-Dozier-Holland. And it could be written today – to either cut down on beer or the kid’s new gear, it’s a big decision in a Town Called Malice. 

20.  The brass and bass introduction to Speak Like A Child.

21.  The French lyrics to The Paris Match and Down In The Seine.

22.  The sheer dedication over the years to one haircut.

23.  The lines from Shelley on the back cover of Sound Affects.

24.  The unaffected familial love of Sweet Pea, My Sweet Pea.

25.  Beautiful acoustic reinventions of Boy About Town and A Man of Great Promise at the Royal Festival Hall.

26.  For showing that it’s not only posh boys who can wear red jumpers slung over their shoulders.

27.  The dedication to the brilliant B-side. Weller lavished some fantastic songs on the B-sides of singles. Liza Radley and Tales From The Riverbank, for example.

28.  Going back home to live once again in the Surrey hills. Weller never poured scorn on home and, from Stanley Road onwards, began to talk about it frequently and affectionately.

29.  Swearing on Time For Truth. It sounded daring to this 15 year old.

30.  The emergence of a melodic singing voice on Wild Wood.

31.  The power of Going Underground. It explodes rather than opens and the “pow, pow, pow” of the final stanza is pure melodic aggression. Perfectly controlled musical anger.

32.  Beautiful Rickenbacker guitars.

33.  For ensuring I avoided wasting any time listening to Genesis or Pink Floyd. When I was at a formative age, Weller informed me that they were rubbish and he was right.

34.  For having the courage to experiment. The Jam was a guitar, bass and drums formula which Weller found limiting. The Style Council went through a brass section all the way to full orchestration. Over the years he has tried his own form of dance music (fail, in my view), guitar rock, winsome folk and soundscapes that are hard to categorize. Weller’s constant, almost obsessive, reinventing self during his solo career. At times he has written in fragments and collages rather than songs and I long for a melody like Monday but I am sure he is right to think that there is only dwindling artistic satisfaction in writing endless mediocre rewrites of old tunes. I don’t love all of the solo stuff but he is still there, 46 years after In The City. 

35.  Winning a poetry speaking competition at school by reciting the lyrics from Funeral Pyre.

36.  For a series of magnificent Paisley scarves which, unlike mine, were probably not bought second hand from the flea market in Oldham.

37.  Lonsdale and Fred Perry.

38.  The way The Jam was written with a squiggle back under the M.

39.  Village, from On Sunset, his best melody for a long time.

40.  His constant plundering. “Good writers borrow; great writers steal”, variously credited to TS Eliot, Picasso and Wilde is true of Weller. The best and most shameless instance is the running bass line to Start! taken note for note from George Harrison’s Taxman. Precious owes a lot to Pigbag but he makes it better.

41.  Being a mentor to the next generation. Watch Weller guest with Noel Gallagher on The Butterfly Collector at the Albert Hall or Don’t Go To Strangers with the extraordinary Amy Winehouse on Jools Holland.

42.  How She Threw It All Away. Weller’s best unknown song.

43.  Looking so stupefied – what on earth am I doing here? – on the Band Aid video.

44.  For writing a song about post-war planning policy, an under-explored topic in the popular music canon.

45.  The great T-shirt which featured the cover of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight. I bought one at the Virgin megastore in Manchester and wore it out.

46.  Because he vindicated my secret love for Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) by interrupting a radio interview with O’Sullivan to say how much he liked the song.

47.  The amazingly languid sound of Long Hot Summer.

48.  Breaking up The Jam in 1982. It felt like a disaster at the time but there was something in the verdict, from a correspondent to the NME, that the Jam were our Beatles and our Elvis but at least they were not about to become our Rolling Stones. I’ve come to think that is a bit harsh on the Stones, and Weller is a sort of Rolling Stone anyway, but The Jam do remain in crystalline form, unspoiled by late-career decline as the greatest English popular music band since The Beatles.

49.  “I’ll always be a mod. You can bury me a mod”.

50.  You’re The Best Thing with a bass Boy George and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

51.  “Think of Edward who’s still at college, you send him letters that he doesn’t acknowledge”. I am the father now, rather than Edward, but I still love that rhyme.

52.  For making the idea of Italian cafes at night sound so exciting. It’s still a treat to sit outside Bar Italia and Weller put that excitement there.

53.  Proving he is still as hard as nails with Wake Up The Nation and From The Floorboards Up.

54.  For providing the soundtrack to some friendships which have now lasted almost half a century.

55.  Having the good grace to write a song for Olly Murs.

56.  Introducing me to Tracy Thorn, on The Paris Match.

57.  The love of design. Weller has always had an aesthetic. In his carefully-chosen clothes, of course, but also in the lettering and design of record sleeves.

58.  Learning to play the piano relatively late in life.

59.  The first band since The Beatles to play two songs on a single edition of Top of the Pops.

60.  Fine cover versions. David Watts, Heatwave, Move On Up, Stoned Out of My Mind, Don’t Make Promises, Early Morning Rain.

61.  “No man should have cowboy boots in his wardrobe. That's fair enough, isn't it? Unless you're a cowboy, of course”. That is a rule for life.

62.  Red Wedge. Miner’s benefit gigs. Anti-apartheid support.

63.  For saying that Waterloo Sunset is his favourite ever song which made me find it in a second-hand record store. That dirty old river is still rolling.

64.  Loyalty. I came to support Weller like a football team. In the days when we used to buy records, I bought everything Weller did, on the day it came out. I liked them all, as a matter of policy. I became entirely uncritical of his work, and it is nice to submit to that state sometimes. I will continue like this until the day one of us is no longer there to provide our respective sides of the bargain.

65.  Love. The Jam were the first band I loved. There have been many more since and some of them have been greater. But the first one teaches you how to appreciate the art form and therefore is contained in all the rest. I feel that way about cities too. Manchester isn’t the world’s greatest city but my love for the others is in part refracted through Manchester. Some part of that love was going into town to search for rare Jam records and T-shirts. And it was also The Apollo, on the Sound Affects tour. John Weller introduced the band and Weller began the guitar riff to But I’m Different Now, I am different now but Weller is with me still. Happy 65^th birthday to the first songwriter I felt belonged to me.